Washington, DC –  ONE and Publish What You Fund today welcomed legislation that directs the Obama administration to develop and implement a national strategy to modernize foreign assistance.  Increasing accountability and streamlining the foreign aid system would improve the effectiveness of foreign aid and provide the U.S. with a powerful tool to alleviate extreme poverty and prevent more people from falling into crisis.  The bi-partisan legislation, titled Initiating Foreign Assistance Reform Act of 2009 (HR 2139), was introduced by Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), Chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee late Tuesday evening.

“Thank you, Chairman Berman, for your leadership on this critical issue.  This legislation will ignite a much-needed effort to provide an unprecedented and strategic framework for U.S. global development efforts.  With a more coherent and streamlined system, our dollars can go further and improve more lives,” said David Lane, President and CEO of ONE

“We congratulate Chairman Berman and the other cosponsors of this important piece of legislation,” said Publish What You Fund Director Karin Christiansen. “Foreign aid is scarce and precious resource, and a key part of replacing people’s poverty across the developing world with hope and opportunity.  Aid transparency is fundamental to that effort, and Chairman Berman and the bill’s other cosponsors have brought us closer to that goal today.

As the all-important opening move in a broader effort to make U.S. foreign assistance more strategic, effective, and transparent, the bill:

• Provides a detailed vision for how U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, fight disease, create opportunity, and foster sustainable security in developing nations are in the nation’s interest; and

• Gives the Obama Administration and Congress a framework for jointly turning a widely-held and important view – that global development should have equal status in U.S. foreign affairs with defense and diplomacy – into effective policy, particularly through a rewrite of the Foreign Assistance Act.

The bill lays ground-work for aid transparency with the following:

• Instructs federal agencies to make aid information on a detailed country-by-country and program-by-program basis in a comprehensive, timely, comparable, and accessible fashion – namely through the use of departmental websites.

• Ensures the transparency, accountability, and effectiveness of US foreign assistance by detailing the planning, allocations and disbursement, terms, contracting, monitoring, and evaluation elements of US foreign assistance efforts.

• Encourages the US government to best assess the use and impact of its foreign assistance efforts in relation to other donor nations and recipient countries by fully engaging in the International Aid Transparency Initiative – the global forum for aid transparency co-ordination.

Publish What You Fund is the not-for-profit campaign for global aid transparency, found at www.publishwhatyoufund.org